Miscellaneous · For families

Meal Prep

Plan a week, or up to a month, of family meals. Every recipe scales to the people at your table, the shopping list adds itself up by store aisle, and you can print it, save it as a PDF or picture, or copy it to your phone.

📅 Start a meal plan 📖 Browse 59 recipes

What it does

One week to a month

Pick a start date and a length. Turn breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks on or off. Drag meals around, copy a day or a week, swap days, or shuffle with rules like “no repeats this week” and “quick dinners on practice nights.”

Scales to your family

Count adults, teens, children and toddlers, each with an adjustable portion size. Add guests to one meal. Recipes scale with sensible rounding: whole eggs, whole cans, quarter pounds.

A shopping list that adds up

Every ingredient in the plan, combined, converted to what stores sell (“2 cans (28 oz)”, “1 dozen”) and grouped by section. Tick off what you already have, add extras, and get a list for the whole plan, a week or a day.

Cook once, eat twice

Make a bigger dinner and put the leftovers on tomorrow’s lunch. The recipe scales up and the shopping list knows.

Prep day

Choose what to cook ahead and get an afternoon schedule: slow cooker first, then the oven one temperature at a time, with stovetop jobs in between.

Made for parents

Hide recipes with any of the nine major allergens, or show only vegetarian, gluten-free or dairy-free. Find quick, budget, freezer and lunchbox meals, and print a picture chart of the week’s dinners for the fridge.

Nutrition estimates

Calories, protein, fat, carbs, fiber and sodium per serving and per day, estimated from USDA FoodData Central, with % Daily Values.

Make it from scratch

Bake the bread, roll the tortillas and pasta, churn butter, simmer stock. Tap Make it and the shopping list swaps the store item for its ingredients, sized to your plan (even which loaf pans to use), and the prep day schedules the rising. See the from-scratch recipes →

Grow it

Tell the planner what you grow and when it comes in, and those come off the shopping list in season. See how much garden a year of your meals would take, then plan it in the Food Garden Planner.

Your own recipes

Add family favorites from about 508 common grocery items, plus write-ins for anything else. Save a backup file to move everything to another device.

The recipes

Everyday family cooking, written for a stated number of servings and tested-style amounts, with safe cooking temperatures from the USDA, make-ahead and freezer notes, ideas for leftovers, kid-friendly tips and easy swaps.

Classic Cheeseburgers22 min · serves 4 Ground Beef Tacos25 min · serves 4 Classic Meat Lasagna1 hr 50 min · serves 8 Spaghetti with Meat Sauce45 min · serves 6 Pot Roast with Carrots and Potatoes8 hr 20 min · serves 6 Simple Roast Chicken1 hr 45 min · serves 5 Family Beef and Bean Chili1 hr 5 min · serves 8 Fluffy Buttermilk Pancakes30 min · serves 4

Dinners (33)Breakfasts (11)Lunches (18)Sides (14)Snacks (7)All recipes →

Kitchen guides

Short, sourced answers to questions that come up while cooking and shopping, kept to what the evidence supports.

Things to Check on FoodsReading the Nutrition Facts label, added sugars, sodium, allergen statements, dates, recalls, storage times and temperatures, and a few rules for babies. Ceylon vs. Cassia CinnamonThe two main kinds of cinnamon, how to tell them apart, which one U.S. stores sell, and what coumarin is and how much is too much. Kitchen Differences That MatterSalt, leaveners, butter, ground beef, chicken cuts, flour, beans, rice, herbs, stock and broth, cream, and date labels: the differences that change how a recipe turns out. Cooking Fats ComparedSeed oils, olive and avocado oil, butter, ghee, tallow, lard and coconut oil: how each is made, what it is made of, how hot it can go, how to store it, and what the official guidance and the public debate say. Food Safety BasicsSafe minimum internal temperatures from USDA, plus clean, separate, cook and chill: the habits the recipes here rely on.

How it works

Open the planner and tell it who’s eating.
Drag recipes onto the days (or tap a recipe, then tap the day). Use Shuffle to fill a week for you.
Check the Shopping list, tick what you have, and print it, save it as a picture, or copy it to your phone.

Your plans are saved in this browser only; nothing is sent anywhere. Nutrition numbers are estimates. Read food labels for allergens yourself, since products change.